A Son’s Weekend
I spent the weekend at my mom’s in Toledo stringing lights, putting up her Christmas tree, cutting evergreen boughs to arrange around family gravestones and doing minor plumbing.
I head for Milwaukee from Detroit tonight (Sunday) for a week of work there, and head home for the year on Friday night.
It’s kind of eerie to walk out to my mom’s garage to get a tool for some task. She lives in the same house that our family built and moved into in 1961, so the tool shelves are in the same place they’ve been for nearly 50 years, populated by the same tools that were always there, and many brought over from the house I was born to, and many handed down to my dad from his grandparents.
These tools have a familiar look, and a familiar feel as I duck under the kitchen sink and confront plumbing handiwork that my dad jerry-rigged sometime in the last 4 decades.
But nothing is permanent. I hear his cursewords as he bumped his head on the 2×4 just inches from my own head, or skinned his knuckles tightening the fitting that I’m about to loosen.
My dad’s tools have long since been dispersed, though I don’t really know what happened to them. He may have sold or given away most of them before he died. To this day, whenever I see an old-fashioned brace and bit, I’m taken back to my dad teaching me how to use it and other tools, like a cross-cut saw: “Son, let the saw do the work.”
That’s really poignant; I can picture him.
Springer - Gawd, the old brace ‘n bit. Totally obviated now by power tools, but an art form my dad passed on to me, even though I never got to use it myself. And, yes, the “let the saw do the work” applies not only to metal vs. wood, but to all kinds of stuff that we deal with from day to day.
Beatriz - so can I. So can I.
Beautiful post, Phil - thanks for sharing it.
Thanks, Nancy. I know you have similar feelings as you contemplate your father’s demise this year, and revisit the physical presence.
Phil,
from the way your post struck, maybe something is permanent. Maybe everything is.
The thing I wasn’t prepared for with fatherhood, not having known mine, and nobody told me, no book ever conveyed, was how physical the connection is. Or can be, I should say, since others have much different experiences, but physical connection has certainly been mine.
I think you are incredibly lucky to be able to return to a place you’ve known all of your life, and have it still be filled with both physical and emotional reminders of times past. I can’t imagine what it would be like to walk into the garage of my childhood and find the tools that were always there. Continuity of that kind is getting lost for most of us. Pity.
Safe journeys to you, Phil.